Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [14]
“He was small in stature, but stout in his independence and convictions,” says Uncle John. “While his forebears had been Roman Catholics, he professed to be an atheist or Free Thinker.” So do I profess. “He would more properly be called a skeptic, one who rejects faith in the unknowable.” “Skeptic” is also the proper thing to call me.
“But he was a very model of Victorian asceticism, lived frugally, and eschewed excesses of any kind,” says Uncle John. I try. I don’t drink anymore, but I smoke like a house afire. I am monogamous, but I have married twice.
“He greatly admired Benjamin Franklin, whom he called an American saint, and named his third son after him instead of naming him for one of the saints on the Christian calendar.” I myself have named my only son after Mark Twain, another American Saint.
“As a recognition of his service to public education,” Uncle John goes on, “one of the City’s schools was named after him. He was highly literate, well read, and the author of various pamphlets expounding his views on education, philosophy, and religion. He wrote his own funeral oration.”
That oration, by the way, appears in Chapter XI. of this book, the chapter on religion. I read it out loud recently to my agnostic son, Mark, who is a physician now, but who set out during his undergraduate years to become a Unitarian minister.
Mark said this of the oration, grinding his teeth before and afterward: “Thesis move.” When you read the oration, and especially if you are a chess player like Mark, you are bound to admire the guts of Clemens Vonnegut.
Note: I do not have the guts to request that Clemens Vonnegut’s oration be read at my funeral, too.
• • •
To return to Uncle John:
“Another one of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s greatgrandfathers who attained distinction locally was Henry Schnull, who, with his brother, August, came to Indianapolis from the town of Hausberge in Westphalia about ten years before the Civil War. They had both been apprenticed as Kaufmann, or merchant, in Germany and knew the methods of trade and accounts. They first engaged in the business of buying and selling farm produce in central Indiana. They traveled about in a wagon to the farms in the area; bought grain, butter, eggs, chickens, and salted and smoked pork, and resold these farm products in the city at a profit.
“As they prospered by the hardest kind of work, they enlarged their operation by trucking surpluses to Madison or Jeffersonville, Indiana, on the Ohio River, where the merchandise was loaded on huge barges which were floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. One or the other of the brothers would accompany the shipment and attend to the trading in New Orleans. Here they would sell the produce in a good market and buy coffee, rum and sorghum, which was called ’New Orleans molasses.’ These products they then shipped north by barge and sold at a profit in Cincinnati or Indianapolis. They are said to have brought to Indianapolis one of the last shipments from the South before the river was closed by the Confederates at Memphis. The price of sorghum and coffee skyrocketed, and the Schnull Brothers then had sufficient capital to establish a wholesale grocery business and construct a warehouse which still stands on the southeast corner of Washington and Delaware Streets in Indianapolis. The firm was originally a partnership known as A. & H. Schnull, later as Schnull & Company. At the close of the Civil War, August announced that he had enough money and wanted to return to Germany. So he sold his interests to Henry and took two hundred thousand dollars back to Hausberge, where he bought a small Schloss and lived like a gentleman until his death in 1918.
“Henry Schnull elected to remain in the United States. He became one of the leading merchants of Indiana, and was a most highly regarded citizen. In addition to his wholesale grocery business he founded the Eagle Machine Works, which later became the great Atlas Engine Company, which manufactured stationary steam engines and farm implements. He also organized the American Woolen